And I greatly support the development of video games as art, but this game is just bad. Seriously, game-play wise and even "Art" wise.

It would be OK if you could explore the damn graveyard- I turned onto a side path to see what it would be like, and had to alt-f4 because the camera didn't follow me.

I was expecting something like Dear Esther (http://dear-esther.com/)
A FREE Half-life 2 mod, that when I finished it for the first time- I sat down for an hour to think about what had just happened, and it was amazing.

I finished The Graveyard and thought "Yup. That happened. Now I'm going to go play a Dear Esther, to attempt to wash that game out of my mind"

It is a great idea, but it isn't pulled off well enough. The dodgy controls fit in with the Old Lady part, but it's FAR to limited and linear, and in all the player is left with nothing to take away from it.

The punchline is, the dev team has said that no game made yet can be considered art. Meaning they're charging 5 bucks for something that's terrible as a game and that even they don't think is art. Before I heard that, I thought the dev team was just unbelievably pretentious, but now we can add "incredibly cynical" to the list.

They're not even charging 5 dollars for the non-game, they're charging for the chance to be able to die in the game. That's literally the only difference between the registered and the non-registered.

This actually had the possibility to be great if the team had put a real effort into making it feel like a -real- place. Let us move the camera around, read the names on the headstones, feed the birds, etc. The game world is incredibly small, it wouldn't have been difficult to do anything along these lines. It just feels phoned in.

If you want to see a game that -really- feels like an 'interactive painting', as I seem to remember the dev team describing this, try The Cat and the Coup. It's much better as a game, as art, and it might even teach you something you didn't know. Takes about the same amount of time to play, and a smaller download. Prettier too, in my opinion.